


The Wind Blows Through It

by synchronized_strangers



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Child Murder, Child Soldiers, Emotionally Stunted Narrator, Gen, Psychopathology & Sociopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 14:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1861842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synchronized_strangers/pseuds/synchronized_strangers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's good. Anyone can see that. Stronger, bigger, more vicious than the others. Ostentatious about it, too, she thinks, smirking. Handsome enough to earn them sponsors. He's perfect because he's good enough to go the distance but he'll never be good enough to kill her.</p>
<p>She lets him think he might be, though, because Cato's good, but Clove is the best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wind Blows Through It

**Author's Note:**

> "Our names shouted in a certain dawn… a message … a summons… there must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said-no. But somehow we missed it."  
> - _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_ , Tom Stoppard

It ends with her head in his hands and meaningless apologies spilling past her lips and she doesn't feel shame for the cowardice because its victory at any cost. It always has been, so she babbles while her hands grasp desperately for a knife, a rock, anything, _anything_ \--

And all she can think is that that girl, that little twit spinning in her dress on stage, was better.

+

Sometimes, only sometimes, Clove looks at Cato and half remembers a ghost of a feeling. It was from before they were tributes, before they were killers, even. When they were something close to children. There are words that could name it -- words like kinship and empathy, camaraderie and shared purpose -- and though she knows all of them they never occur to her as related to her mysterious feeling. Those words are weak ones, potentially exploitable angles. They have no connection to her or anything that's ever happened to her.

She does wonder if it might have been love, that feeling, but not as a loss. As something narrowly escaped.

+

He's good. Anyone can see that. Stronger, bigger, more vicious than the others. Ostentatious about it, too, she thinks, smirking. Handsome enough to earn them sponsors. He's perfect because he's good enough to go the distance but he'll never be good enough to kill her.

She lets him think he might be, though, because Cato's good, but Clove is the best.

+

I want to win for my family, she says when they ask her. It's the same answer every time, one they hear frequently and not just from her. Sometimes it might even be the truth. Her family wants another winner. It's all she's heard her whole life. Her first bed time story, her first movie, her first dream is Great Aunt Maddie winning the 65th Hunger Games. When she's small she thinks her Aunt was wonderful and when she's seven she thinks her Aunt was lucky and by the time she's beaten the rest and won the right to go to the Games Clove thinks her Aunt was sloppy and deserved to die.

Her family wants her to win for all the prestige, the benefits, the Winner's Circle house and the near limitless money. The right to say, "Our daughter won."

Clove's reason is much simpler. She wants what she's always wanted, what she's spent her entire life striving and bleeding and working towards. Clove wants to be the best and she doesn't give a damn about the house or the goods or even getting whored out afterwards as long as she gets to hear, "The winner of this year's Hunger Games."

+

It was an accident, she says, and they almost believe her because of the tears. She's tiny and fragile and when she looks up at them through her dark lashes, wet and glistening with salt, they think, "She probably didn't mean it."

He's there at her sister's funeral, eyes narrowed and glued to her with the kind of focus a predator devotes to the kill. She catches his eye as they lower the casket. Smirks.

Because he's ostentatious, Cato smiles back and shows his teeth.

A year later, he kills his brother and says, "He was competition," because he wants everyone to see him coming.

He never does learn subtlety.

+

When they give that girl a 12, Clove looks at him with all seriousness and says, "We kill her first." He grins, because he likes the idea of him being the one to do it, but Clove isn't laughing. She made a mistake once before thinking the girl was no threat and it's one she _will not_ make again.

Clove knows the benefits it confers, being underestimated.

+

In District 1, there is a girl watching who thinks Clove was unlucky, but one day she'll realize the truth. 

Clove was sloppy and she deserved to die.


End file.
